Ask garamet

*Shrug* I've grown, you haven't.

Me, I'd write the thing first, then do the outline later.

If I knew what was going to happen, there'd be no point in me writing the thing...I'd be bored.

IMO, Tolkein couldn't be published today...at least not in the U.S., at least not without cutting LOTR up into little pieces and submitting them one at a time. Unless he changed his name to Terry Pratchett. Then he could sign a seven-book deal without having the slightest clue what happened after page 1 of Book 1.

Some writers have more juju than others. I'm not quite sure how that works. Been trying to figure it out for nearly 30 years.

As for writing the whole book first, then pulling an outline out of it - that's not a bad idea for your first sale, for several reasons. One, you've got no deadline, hence all the time in the world to write the thing (17 years, though...). Two, if you pitch it with three chapters and an outline, the editor's going to get itchy and want to see the rest of it. So if you stall for 3-6 months and then hand in this work of genius that you've obviously been writing 24/7 since you signed the deal (and not scratching out word-by-word for the previous three years), your editor will be awestruck and want to keep you.

Third, if you really love to write, you'll have so much fun finishing the thing that you won't mind that it's sucking up your weekends, your S.O. isn't speaking to you, and you might not see a dime from it.

P.S. Baba, I've hugged several Trek actresses, even air-kissed a few. But not on the mouth. Sorry to disappoint you.

Okay, brand names and such.

Products, businesses, periodicals etc.

Can I get away with using real names under fair use, or should I hedge my bets by fictionalizing everything?

Stephen King seems to get away with using real cereals and K-Mart all he wants.

Or, is he just rich enough to pay everyone off?

I mean, I'll fictionalize if I have to.
It's just that it gets tedious after awhile, and slows down my natural instinctive flow to have to say the guy took a sip of his Shmolgers Shminstant Shmoffee, and read his Smortland Shmess Shmerald.

Well, not that cheesy, but you get the point.

Very possibly. But not having gone to the right schools nor ever been invited to a writers' retreat, I didn't know that there were Rules. I just wrote. *shrugs*

The outer structure was a LaMaze childbirth class, and the ninth character was the nurse who conducted the class. The eight stories contained in the frame were about each of the eight women in the class and what their lives were like leading up to the pregnancy. The end of each individual story was when each woman gave birth, and the frame ended with the nurse contemplating her now-empty classroom and anticipating the next class.

ABC-TV did a couple of MOWs called "Having Babies." Same frame concept, different individual stories. No way to make a connection with my unsold ms. Just coincidence, a common idea on the ether at the time. Dammit...

You can be my editor anytime.

The story I wanted to write was about a medieval scholar in her 60s who suffers a stroke and is unable to read afterwards. The college where she has tenure uses this to oust her, and a group of loyal students and alumni try to get her reinstated.

My thinking was that the tenor of the times (this was mid-1970s, and women were "allowed," very briefly, to write serious fiction in the Final Payments, The Women's Room, Fear of Flying vein, a brief window of opportunity that was slammed and locked in the Eighties and, to my knowledge, has only opened for certain subgroups of women since, and I ain't one of 'em) - or any time, really - was that "youth sells," and so an older character would not be a good selling point.

So I pulled out one of the alumni - a young single mother struggling to find herself after divorce - and made her the "main" character but, frankly, she bored me. So I put off writing her part of the story until after I'd established the professor and her plotline.

It's rare, but I've bumped up against editors like that, all of them, interestingly, male. Female editors tend to be all/nothing. They'll dismiss you in the outline phase with "Um, no" and not bother to tell you why. Male editors will okay your outline, then bitch about little things after you've written the book. You'd think it would be the other way around, but it isn't, at least in the sample of editors I've worked with.

However, at least 51% of book editors are responsible adults, so one just hopes to keep running into them.

Very much like. An outline gives a soupcon of character development ("Lingri the Inept is one of the last of her kind, driven back to her island world by the genocidal war. Alone in a windowless room, she writes of her life's experiences..."), and the rest is pretty much "and then this happens, and then that happens..."

My ideas come to me by way of the characters, so they pretty much suggest their own names. (I know that's vague, but it's the best I can do to describe it - if a character name is wrong, I'll just feel it.)

I've not been aware that name searches have been done for any characters of mine, and I'm guessing they aren't, as a general rule, in the book biz, because I've never been asked to change a name.

I do know there's a fine line between using a Real Life person in one's fiction and creating a character who might resemble a Real Life person, but that's a separate topic.

So you are entirely self-taught? No writing classes at college? No subscriptions to Writer's Digest? No "How to write the Great American Novel" books?

Where did you get your sense of the craft from? Purely via observation and analysis? Gut feel? Conversation and feedback?

On that track, what value - if any - do you feel that formal teaching aids have to the aspiring writer?

Hehe. Well, those who can, do. And those who can't, edit.

Do you feel that writing to accommodate trends of the times is a compromise, or a contraint that can inspire creativity? Do you feel there is a need to balance artistic integrity and commercial necessity?

Can you recognise those 51% by their clothes, physical posturing or vocal inflections? More seriously, what are the attributes of a good editor?

Another question: You write novels. Do you have any interest in/have you ever attempted writing other forms of fiction? Short stories, radio, TV, film, theatre, poetry, song lyrics etc?

If you're lucky you can even get paid to use real names. I can't recall the name of the book or author offhand but product placement has entered the realm of the novel. About a year or two ago a jewelry company (??) paid a well-known writer to include (favourable) references to their product in her latest book. Given that this is common in film and video games it was inevitable it would happen in publishing as well.

What Jean Prouvaire said. Just dropping product names into your work is not a problem. If you did something really derogatory, like have your main character spend 20 pages dissing Starbuck's or Kleenex or something, might be. Can't say for sure, 'cause I've never tried it.

Product references can give your work texture, set it in a time and place, and that's good. A few pointers, though. Make sure you spell things correctly. (I just proofed something for someone who didn't know it was "Ben & Jerry's" and not "Ben and Jerry's," and who misspelled Hannibal Lecter.)

Also, if you're writing a period piece, make sure the product was extant in the time period you're writing. If you've set something in the Fifties, f'rinstance, you wouldn't want to create an anachronism by mentioning, say, Diet Coke.

Now, mentioning RL people's names is a whole 'nother subject.

Yeah, I took your basic Creative Writing 101 course in undergrad. Can't say that I really took anything away from it except the realization that most of my classmates couldn't write for spit. And I may have read a copy or two of Writer's Digest, because I remember seeing the ads for Writer's Market in the back. Once I ordered my first copy of Writer's Market, I just set about finding an agent for the stuff I was already writing.

I grew up in a household where the watchword was "Shut the hell up! Nobody cares what you have to say!" Kept a diary from the age of 12 - it was the only place I could finish a thought uninterrupted. And I learned to listen really, really well. Like Gillian Taylor "I have a photographic memory. I see words."

I also tested at a 12th-grade reading level in the third grade, and had teachers who were wise enough to give me supplemental material. And probably the kindest thing my mother ever did for me was sign a permission slip at the local library to let me use the adult section from the time I got my first library card.

I was also fortunate enough to have an 11th-grade English teacher who literally turned my life around. She took me aside after she'd read one of my compositions and said "Whatever else you do with your life, you must always, always write."

Under her guidance, I soaked in everything that was worth reading, and continued to do so via an English degree from a small liberal arts college. And while I can't balance a checkbook and have no idea what "x" has to do with math, my mind is a compost heap of eclectic information.

When someone else's writing grabs me, I try to figure out why. My heroes are writers like Dickens, Faulkner and, more contemporarily, Le Carre and his American counterpart, Martin Cruz Smith. Oh, and once in a while I'll go slumming in Kellerman or Hillerman country. And - surprise - I read very little s/f. Because once I get into the groove of why another writer's work does it for me, I have to be careful to avoid imitation.

Not a clue. Never had the opportunity. And, unfortunately, too many of the people I know who have done the writers' conference/group thing end up neurotic and self-referential.

I have a friend who's written one short story. Every so often she'll have a public reading and ask for feedback. Then she'll go home and rewrite the story after her "friends" have picked it apart. Rinse, repeat.

She'll probably never publish that short story. And she'll probably never start another one. That's an extreme example, but groupthink is dangerous. Too many wannabe writers get their jollies tearing other people's work apart.

And you also have to ask yourself why someone is teaching writing instead of...well...writing.

But this could all be sour grapes on my part. :dry:

If you want to sell to the NY-based book business, you have to offer them something they want. Gone are the days when an editor will be so captivated by the writing that they'll pay you to produce something of Lit'rary Merit for its own sake. If you have the luxury of self-publishing, of course, you can write to please yourself.

Actually, it's the bored "La-la-la, I'm not listening to you" expression on their faces that usually gives them away. Or the fact that they sit on your manuscript for months and never return your agent's calls.

A good editor is interesting in editing, not in bullying the writer into writing what the editor would write if s/he had the talent. A good editor actually reads the manuscript before dumping it on the copy editor and the proofreader. A good editor can see where the weak spots are and either tweak them hirself or tell the writer what the objective eye can see that the writer, who's too close to the material, can't.

A really good editor buys lunch, plies you with the beverage of your choice and says "So, what would you like to write next?"

I tinkered with theater in college, not well. Have written a handful of short stories that have garnered lots of rejection letters, but never sold one.

(Once sent a story to a s/f mag whose editor sent me a rejection letter that, I swear, was longer than the story.)

As for media, I've seen too many friends break their hearts pitching stuff that never sold, and I find the formats too confining. (What the hell is a three-minute scene, anyway?). Besides, given that 80% of WGA membership is white males under age 38, I've already got two strikes against me. And TV/film scripting is another kind of groupthink. I've never mastered the art of Writing by Committee.

So, like Popeye, I yam what I yam. That used to be enough to pay the bills, but not in today's market. So I may as well do it for the joy of it, and never surrender my white plume.

Can you give some examples of how certain writers have influenced your technique? For instance, you cite Le Carre as providing the "template" for Catalyst of Sorrows. I haven't read any of his works (or even seen any film/TV adaptations of his works AFAICR) so am curious - what was the template in question? The way the narrative technique dips and out of scenes perhaps? Something else entirely? What about other writers and other works of yours?

This seems to be reasonably common. Do you - as some other writers seem to - end up reading a lot more non-fiction (perhaps for research or inspiration) than fiction?

On that matter, how do you approach research? Read up well before starting the novel to immerse yourself in the world? Research tactically to answer specific questions as they occur? Do you use expert friends or contacts? Books and magazines? Or do you just google everything cause, if it's on the internet then it must be true?

I'm guessing John Grisham and Terry Pratchett have really good editors then?

What, you're not white?

Couple of other questions...

Have you ever had a work of yours optioned for another medium? If so, what was that experience like?

Are you the sort of writer to whom the actual act of putting words on paper (or screen these days) comes easily? Or do you sweat over every word? I don't necessarily mean how much rewriting do you do (I assume that most professional writers do a lot) but rather, regardless on whether you're on draft 1 or draft 10, are you more like Oscar Wilde (who apocryphally spent an afternoon on a comma) or Harlan Ellison (who wrote an entire story on the fly and in public)?

I'm going to answer this one in installments:

Leonard Nimoy once said Star Trek is all about character. That whether the week's episode is something dramatic like "Balance of Terror" or something cute and silly like "The Trouble with Tribbles," what really makes it work is the interaction between the characters.

I was drawn to Star Trek, not because of the s/f trappings, but because of the characters, and the way they were revealed to us through dialogue and a serendipitous mix of good chemistry between the actors, and some savvy direction.

Simple example, early first season, I believe it's "The Corbomite Maneuver." I forget the exact line, but Kirk asks Spock a rhetorical question, and Spock replies "Has it occurred to you that there is a certain...inefficiency...in constantly questioning me on matters you've already made up your mind about?"

CU on Kirk. The expression on his face is a little sheepish and says "Busted!"

What this little exchange tells us is that: (1) Kirk is an Alpha male who makes quick gut decisions, but wants to have backup from the intellectual side, (2) Spock prefers to be the power behind the throne and appreciates the fact that Kirk respects his opinions, (3) both men have been through this scenario a dozen times before, each knows what the other will do, and each has a deep professional respect for the other, based on trust and an evolving friendship.

That thread follows through to the moment in TWOK when Spock nerve-pinches McCoy and steps into that radiation-flooded chamber. That action makes sense because of who the character is.

This is the same reason I love le Carre's writing. Action springs from character. His most memorable character is an MI6 agent named George Smiley, played by Alec Guinness in the two BBC series based on the novels Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and Smiley's People.

Now, there a zillion spy novels out there, and there's the James Bond myth. 97% of those spy novels are formulaic, predictable, and the characters are cardboard - meat puppets spouting dialogue to push the action along, with the occasional explosion, gunfight, poisoning, etc. to try to make things interesting.

Bond was unusual in his era because he had something resembling a personality. But he was as credible, really, as Superman. Take away the women and the car and the gadgets and the account at Harrod's, and what do you have? Another cardboard character. Glib, clever dialogue, on an adolescent male level but, to borrow a favorite line of le Carre's, "Who is he when he's at home?"

Le Carre's Smiley is a credible spy, because he can do something Bond cannot - blend into the woodwork and do the actual work of spying, which is to listen, to overhear, to observe without being observed.

Smiley has a private life as well - a disastrous one. A career civil servant with a good enough education, he married above himself, to a woman (played by the inimitable Sian Phillips) of money and privilege who simply cannot keep her knickers on. Why she married this owlish little academic is anyone's guess, but she'll screw anyone from some diplomat she meets at a cocktail party to the gardener, and her peccadillos eat at Smiley's soul.

On the other side is his lifelong nemesis, the KGB agent known only as Karla (played, if you can imagine, by a bearded - and UNSPEAKING - Patrick Stewart. Best work I've ever seen him do, because for once he couldn't coast on the voice, but had to do some actual acting). The two are locked in a deadly ideological yin/yang that spans decades and costs countless lives on both sides, each determined to cancel the other out, even if it means his own destruction.

Powerful forces, focused in the person of a chubby little old man in thick glasses who would be more at home in a library than on the front lines of the Cold War. Guinness was perfect in the role. But even before the TV version, there were the novels, replete with fascinating characters who revealed themselves through carefully crafted dialogue.

That was the template for Catalyst of Sorrows. Write a spy novel/medical thriller disguised as a Trek novel, utilizing the Trek characters while introducing, in this case, just one original character, avoiding the pitfalls of "your characters are overshadowing the Trek characters" which was where the trouble began with PROBE, and do what le Carre also does, which is:

Show both sides equally. IRL, there are no Good Guys and Bad Guys. Both sides - whether it's the Soviets vs. the West, or Romulans vs. the Federation - are comprised of individuals who are venal, corrupt, self-serving, as well as idealistic, self-sacrificing, and motivated by forces laid into them when they were very young which make them see the world from a certain POV.

In short, the best fiction teaches us that we're all in this together, and we'd make things easier for ourselves and the future if we'd stop name-calling and pull together. The best fiction teaches us that most people bumble through life without ever learning this, and that's what makes for drama. But if someone can finish a book of mine - as I have with le Carre's - and say "Hey, I learned something," then I have succeeded, not only in getting paid for what I do and providing a few hours' entertainment for a few people, but in planting a seed of a beginning of something that might make the world a less harrowing place.

Upton Sinclair's The Jungle it ain't yet, but I'm working on it.

I'm a very lazy - and very lucky - researcher. Pre-Internet, whenever I was looking for material on a particular subject, I'd just walk into the library and the books I needed seemed to jump off the shelves at me. Can't tell you how many times I was literally walking past the Books-to-Return cart and there on the top shelf would be just the thing.

And very often the research itself will determine the direction of the writing. For example, Preternatural Too: Gyre involves time travel. I chose two eras I knew a fair amount about - World War II, European Theatre, and the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine. And just because I was curious about the era, I threw in the pre-Christian Celts, circa 50 B.C.

Now, I went to Catholic schools and suffered through three years of Latin, starting with Caesar's wars in Gaul, so I sorta kinda knew that the sonofabitch had slaughtered about a million of my people and, as a reward, he got to be emperor. What I didn't know was that one of the biggest battles of his campaign took place following the seige of a Celtic stronghold of some 40,000 inhabitants in what is now the South of France, known as Avaricum.

AFAIK, the ruins of Avaricum have not been found, but the city seems to have been near the city of Bourges. Which just happens to be where Eleanor of Aquitaine was married to her first husband, Louis VII of France.

So not only did I have a bang-up 2,000-year-old battle scene in which to involve a 20th century character, but I had a tie-in to the 12th-century scenes as well.

There have been any number of like coincidences, enough to make me wonder if they really are coincidences or if the whole thing's already been written on the Collective Consciousness. Which I'll get to in the next installment.

And, of course, nowadays one doesn't even have to shlep to the library...it's all at one's fingertips. Just this past week I learned some fascinating things about a snake's sense of smell that will come in very handy in the Pike novel.

And that's all I'm going to say about that until it's in the bookstores.

Okay, lessee if I can wrap this up...

Novel of mine called Risks was produced by St. Martin's Press several years before the movie Working Girl was released. I mention this only because the themes were similar - how corporate life treats the ambitious woman - only instead of the gutsy little secretary winning the corner office AND Harrison Ford, my character ends up nearly losing her kids, her house and her career until she realizes she doesn't want the career, chucks it and goes into the antiques business, and lives happily ever after.

Anyhoo, several years after my novel had gone out of print, I got a call from my agent saying one of the cable networks wanted to option it. (It's been a while; I don't even remember which one - the paperwork's in a box in a closet somewhere.)

The option was for 18 months, the option amount was a low four figures of found money, and at the end of the 18 months the option was not renewed. On my agent's advice, I simply spend the money and put the idea that this was ever going to be a made-for-TV movie out of my mind, because hundreds of thousands of properties are optioned every year, and a fraction of a percentage of them are ever produced.

So, the money was nice, and that's all she wrote.

Yes.

There are days when I'd be better off cleaning the oven or going down to the beach for all the progress I make in attacking that blank page. There are other days when the process is a roller-coaster, and all I can do is hang on and try to get the words down before they fly past. There are scenes that practically write themselves, and scenes that have to be turned inside out and sideways and pounded with a whiffle bat to get them to lie down.

That's why it's always been my impression that the stuff is Out There already, and I'm just grabbing onto it as it flows past. Which is why the stray thought that tickles my ear at 4 a.m. has to be responded to, because if I don't write it down right then, it won't be there when the sun comes up.

And it's why there's a scene on page 129 of the Pike manuscript that I've tweaked a dozen times, and I still don't like it. So when I get to page 400+, I'll have to go back and poke it with a stick one more time to make it cooperate. Just another line of dialogue, something.

This is all completely subjective, of course. Anyone else would look at the scene and say "It's fine. Makes perfect sense. Leave it alone." But I'm the final arbiter of whether or not that's true.

Okay, I think that's everything. Who's next?

Okay Garamet, I'm just dying to know . . .

You've referenced a "vampire lady" who finished/re-wrote one of your Trek books and detailed what a bad experience that was fairly extensively. What I want to know is, was the "vampire lady" Laurell Hamilton?

Nope, not Laurell Hamilton. And I don't want to say much more than that in a public forum.

One thing I had a little discussion with friends lately: they are all huge Harry Potter fans (I'm not), and somehow we also came to the topic of BRIDGET JONES. Now that's 2 very successful books made into movies, Potter 10 times or so more.

The question we couldn't answer even with a little 'net research: if you have a hugely successful book like the Potter series that's made into hugely successful movies - what brings in more money? The millions of books or the movie rights (not any percentage of the movie profits!)

My guess is the movie rights. Am I right?

The merchandising rights to a garamet book would be worth more then the movie. Think george lucas.

what do you think of leo streuss?

^Not familiar with him.

Hard for me to say, because except for one instance where one of my books was optioned for 18 months but not renewed, I have no experience with the book-to-movie business. However, here's what I do know:

With rare exception (Stephen King once lobbied for, and got, a much better deal), book royalties for original fiction in the U.S. at least are paid out as follows:

10% of the cover price for the first 150,000 copies sold (after the advance has been earned out)

15% of the cover price thereafter.

So if you figure how many copies of a book at what cover price you'd have to sell to make how many thousands of dollars, that's your algorithm.

(Genre fiction - s/f, fantasy, etc., I'm not sure about romance or mysteries - pays less, usually a 6-8% royalty on the first 150,000 copies, 10% thereafter, although my agent was able to get me 10% for my original s/f. And genre tie-in fiction - i.e. Star Trek - pays even less.)

So, f'rinstance, if your book is produced in hardcover at a $25 sale price, you as the author earn $2.50. A $6.99 softcover earns the author $.699 a copy, unless it's genre, in which case it's more like $.4194 to $.5592. And, yes, publishing companies have phalanxes of accountants who do nothing all day but crunch these numbers. The rest gets split along some diabolically clever equation between the publisher and the bookstore.

Now, if your novel is optioned for movie rights - and actually bought, because for every novel bought, thousands are optioned but never go to contract and, of those bought, only a certain portion are actually produced as films - things get even more complicated.

Is it "story by" Cassandra, with someone else writing the screenplay? Is it "based on a novel by" Cassandra, with someone else writing the screenplay? Is it - o rarity, unless you're Michael Crichton - "screenplay by Cassandra, based on her novel of the same name"? Each of these pays you more money, starting at six figures, moving up into seven figures.

(We won't discuss creative control/creative license, the clauses which, if you are lucky, get put into your contract so that, at best, you get to loiter on the set and watch your movie being shot or, at worst, if what turns up on the screen bears NO resemblance to what you wrote, you can pitch a hissy and have your name removed from the project.)

Just empirically, I'd say the real money is at the movie end, even for a J.K. Rowling, because no matter how many books she sells (and, in fact, because of the number of books she sells), one multi-million movie deal - with royalties from licensed products - Harry Potter action figures, Harry Potter bedsheets and Underoos, Harry Potter Happy Meals - will make a helluva lot more money.

Me, I'd settle for one book-to-movie deal. Always thought it would be especially funny if Leonard Nimoy happened upon a copy of Preternatural, since one of the sub-plots involves a character very much like Leonard Nimoy directing a movie based on a novel called Preternatural.

Ah, well, a girl can dream...

^I should add to this that the film rights to a novel are very seldom in the million-dollar range. A best-seller like The English Patient might be, and writers whose books are frequently optioned for film (I'm thinking Larry McMurtry) can demand that much, but an obscure novel that someone decides would make a good film is often offered much less. Since novelists aren't covered by the Writers Guild, it depends on what the studio thinks it can get away with.

Do you think that George Lucas' hostility toward various guild's is justified. Such as wanting to maintain total control of his films. Remember Garamet Lucas started out as a independent film director So I see things through their point of view. Lucas didn't like the way the guilds wanted Opening Credits and they did the stupid thing of fining him over that incident.

Can't say I've followed Lucas' career in any great detail, but I'm always a little wary of control freaks.

Question time!

When writing a novel that you've been assigned by a publisher, is the editor the first person you show it to when it's ready to be seen? I ask because I've never written anything that wasn't on spec, and with that stuff (such as the full length play I'm finishing the first draft of right now), when it's ready to be seen I have a few other trusted friends I show it to first. With something that isn't being written on spec, is that an option?

Garamet have you ever thought on writing for a RPG game?

Not really. I'm not very good at playing them, and I have no idea what the demographic (i.e. teen and 20-something fanboys) would find interesting.

Truth to tell, all I've ever really wanted was to be a successful novelist. Back in the day when publishers actually offered decent advances, and ran ads in the Times and Locus announcing their books, and sent their marketing people around to bookstores to actually place books, I managed to do exactly that.

These days it's a bit more challenging. The publisher dotes on a handful of Big Names, and the rest of us are expected to do everything for ourselves. Which begs the question of why we need a mainstream publisher. A lot of veteran writers are self-publishing or forming cooperatives to market each other's work. That's the future.

Back to basics.

garamet, how would you outline a novel you're writing?

What I mean is, how extensive is it?

For example, Catalyst of Sorrows. Since it's already published, could you post what your original outline looked like, assuming it violates no trade secrets or personal ethics or anything?

I want to get a handle on how well I should structure the story I'm working on.

Thanks Dan Will use.

Love to hear garamet's POV, still, simply because I know her book and I could see it more in practice.

But good stuff, D.